David Mathew - O My Days

Not big enough to get sprayed!

The noise is outlandish, the violent subject of the conversation—usually banned inside the classroom—permitted here in the heat of the Cookery Room only because the two speakers happen to be reflecting on the implications of a film seen last night.

Believe it or not, the two speakers are Roller and Meaney. The Cookery Class is packed full. This is a test. Every one of the ten cookers is being used—oven roaring, hotplate blazing—and as I say, the noise is nearly unbearable. But the heat! O my days! The heat! The sweat! And this is a test. Some will pass and some will fail. Not a test of our cooking, of course: it’s a test of our stamina (parched air, building-site din) and it’s a test of our trust. This test is the last chance for a Cookery Class in the future; it’s a chance to get Roller and Meaney together—with Dott. And with me. No pun intended, it’s a pressure cooker. We are the ingredients the scene needs. Ten students means this: at least five (loud) conversations going on at one time. Often more. Some yoots can one-man- band it, innit, holding three or more chats simultaneously—to the backdrop noise of scraping knives and banging pots.

So I’m listening to a review of a film called Mad Filth —

bottled him with a perfume bottle still, blood, yat—

and I’m listening to a preview of an expected sexual liaison—

since I come in here she’s got nice bums and nice plums; I’ll move to her, blood—even though he’s a lifer.

And then I’m listening to so much shit being chatted that I’m busting vex and I want to take the butter knife I’m holding and ram it right into Meaney’s arm. Twist it good; grind it hard. Really put it on the cunt—although he’s done nothing wrong to me.

There’s a high squeak of pain—remarkable that it can half silence the noise; more remarkable yet when I understand it’s my own. Thoughts tumble through my head. I’ve been burnt on my arm. The burn’s too high up. I’ve been bitten by an insect.

I’ve been stung by a bee.

I’ve been stung by a bee.

The notion overwhelms me. Pain exactly at the point where the fuzzy little fucker stung me when I was seven. I shake my arm and let go of the butter knife by mistake. Thank the Lord!—the bastard thing rattles against the saucepan in which I’m cooking bolognese sauce.

Alfreth! the Gov shouts.

If that knife was anywhere else but on a stove right now, I’d be looking at at least two months down block.

Just an insect bite, sir, I call back. Sorry, sir.

But I got you for a second there, didn’t I, Billy Boy?

That’s the voice at the back of my head. Dott’s voice. When I turn to him—Dott—over there in the corner, where he’s been since the start of the class, he is smiling. He mouths it—no noise—but I hear him in my skull.

Nearly made you do it, Billy. Could’ve made you if I’d wanted.

I concentrate on his face; I concentrate on his voice. Though it ripples through me like revulsion I even think of his crimes—or what I know of them. I must get closer, I tell myself, getting stressed. But Dott—Dott can’t hear me. I can’t do it, any more than I can ride a unicycle or cure myopia. I start to take out my frustration on my sauce, compulsively stirring in shake after shake of chilli powder. Dott’s on my mind but he’s not in my head. Left the building; hung up the line. Drops me one lousy communiqué and then dumps me. I remember him shaving his chest in my presence.

What the hell are you doing, Alfreth?

It’s the Cookery Gov’s voice, in my ear. Makes me jump.

When I blink my way back, two lively tears spring from my eyes into my bolognese.

I could nick you for that, he informs me.

For what, sir?

Misuse of prison property.

I’m still not quite certain what he means. What, the chilli, sir? I ask.

Yes, the chilli, sir. You got a deathwish or something?

I just like it spicy, sir, I improvise.

You’d better had, Alfreth: you’re eating the fucking lot.

The walk from the Education block to the Wing will be a race with the Devil, as I struggle to hold into my intestine what desperately wishes to crash out. The noise inside my cell will be like a tractor dropped into a duckpond. But first there is another ordeal. First I have to eat the fucker. Twin agonies, in fact. I can’t bear Ronald Dott’s indifference to me as he works on his cheesey pasta bake. Is he taunting me? Indirectly, maybe, but not full on. He’s in his own little world, and no one’s invited. No one’s speaking to him. When the dish is done he sits down with the rest of us to eat what he has prepared. Eating in the Cookery Room is the only quiet time of the session. We are no more likely to speak than lions around a fallen zebra are to flirt or play. We guard our prey avidly.

I spoon in the first forkful of lava. Towards the end of our meals we take it in turns to claim the attention of the Cookery Gov—asking dumb questions, usually—so that some of us can stuff what we’re too full to eat into our boxer shorts for later on—either to eat or to sell. I won’t be doing the same (I imagine the feel of solid fire and it turns my stomach) but I’m not surprised to notice Dott fisting the last portion of his bake beneath the waistband of his tracksuit bottoms. It is better to conceal your food quite close to your scrotum. When we leave the room and the screws pat us down for hidden tools, they are not allowed to touch our bollocks. But other methods are used. I know of at least one inmate whose chosen style is to cook curry to a ripe old density and then smear it all over his upper thighs on a visit to the toilet before the end of the lesson. I have never favoured this approach myself, but each to his own.

It is time to go back to our cells. Bowels screaming and lassooing, I hobble alongside Dott, simply hoping for something—some exchange, a raise of the eyebrow even still.

He leaves it till the very last instant. Just before our paths have to part in order for us to aim for our Wings, Dott moves slightly closer and says, Hold out your hand, Billy. And I do so.

I can’t look down—but I identify what he has placed in my right palm anyway. I close my fist on it and reposition my hand inside my pants—the fashion statement is so widespread that the screws don’t give it a second glance. It’s not until I get back to my cell that I can comprehend why Dott has squidged some of his pasta bake into my grip. Does he think I’m hungry?

My position is secure on the toilet, but my body doesn’t care about comfort or convenience right now. I will be there some time. Plenty of time to read the letter that Dott has stuffed inside his meal.

Darkness has fallen by the time my lower body has recovered. It is one of those feverish evenings that sometimes shatter the monotony; one of those evenings when bizarre but unquestioned matters arise. For no reason at all a yoot on G Wing starts singing ‘I Want to Break Free’ at the top of his voice. It is spooky that no one seems to have a TV blaring or a bass-line tumping. The sound carries. It’s an anthem for us, of course; and before long the lone voice—which I can just about hear at first—is joined. One yoot, two yoots, seven yoots more. It’s like an epidemic the way it spreads from Wing to Wing. From A to H, via Puppydog F Wing: eight Wings and four hundred versions of Freddie Mercury. Singing our lungs to bursting. Mindless. I can even imagine the dead rising from their graves, in the cemetery yonder, rattling their long brown bones on the headstones, keeping time and keeping rhythm.

The boys on C Wing take the guitar solo.

Though it’s happened before—this kind of spontaneous singalong—it has not happened for a while, and now, with Dott present, the singularity of the exercise assumes an eerie new implication. I sing anyway. The last time it happened it was ‘Jailhouse Rock’; the time before that, ‘Folsom Prison Blues’: old songs that somehow (it’s on the wind, it’s in our food) we all know the lyrics to. I sing along to ‘I Want to Break Free’ for, I don’t know, the first thirty or so repetitions, into the night. The chant is still going strong when I decide to call it an evening and re-read what Dott has handed me—stopping reading only when a screw whose eyes I don’t know (he or she must be short) opens my flap and regards me and my silence with brief suspicion. Not wishing to cause trouble, I start to sing again.